The Local Government Bill 2000 is a very extensive piece of proposed legislation and runs to an excess of two hundred pages, it contains radical changes in the whole area of Local Self Governance. The County Development Board is dealt with in section 128 of the bill and a copy of the relevant section is attached to this report. (Appendix 1)

It provides a legislative frame work for many of the issues already covered in the Task Force Report from which you are very familiar with at this stage. It broadly deals with composition, functions and funding of the board. One interesting issue to note is that the bill provides for the direct election of the Chairman of County Council, following the next local elections. The bill proposes that this elected Chairman would also be the Chairman of the County Development Board.

Audit of Service Provision

The committee established to look at the whole area of the Audit of Service Provision met on 8th August, 2000 the recommendations of this committee are as follows:

The audit should be conducted from a service perspective rather than an agency perspective.

The committee noted that several organisations were conducting audits for their own purposes. Therefore care must taken to avoid the problem of duplication in conducting this audit of services.

The emphasis of the audit should be on the following sectors:

Youth
Child Care
Unemployed
Travellers
Disabilities (Physical Sensory & Intellectual)
Homeless
Asylum Seekers/Refugees
Support for Business
Support for Tourism
Support for Agriculture
Support for Arts and Cultural Activities

It is further recommended that an independent person would be required in order to prepare a draft audit for consideration by the board, a number of names were suggested in this context to be discussed at the next board meeting. One suggestion was made that a brief be prepared based on the committee's discussion and that a number of persons be asked to tender for the task.

Recent Reports

Over the last couple number of months the Combat Poverty Agency has produced a large volume of reports and papers on the whole issue of social exclusion in our society. This issue is also reflected in other public documents, in particular the National Plan. It would be an easy matter for me to circulate all of the documentation I receive, however the members of the board at the first meeting indicated that they do not wish this to happen. I am mentioning this in order to remind you that all the reports are available and can be provided for members on request. Some members of the board have access to these reports and I would be happy for them to suggest material that should be circulated. The executive summary of the National Anti - Poverty Strategy was circulated to you at an earlier stage.

Area Development Management recently produced a report on Rural Transport and a study was conducted from a community prospective. The executive summary recommendations from this report are attached. (Appendix 2)

Another area that I have extensive information on is Local Agenda 21, this is an area that is constantly being mentioned and regularly misunderstood. I am attaching a couple pages from a recent publication, which will hopefully help to crystallise what is meant by this issue.
(Appendix 3)

Data & Indicators

One of the early chapters of the Strategy for Economic, Social and Cultural Development will contain a social and economic analysis of the county as already indicated it is proposed to carry out this analysis in conjunction with the exercise to prepare Kilkenny County Council's County Development Plan. However, to inform this process a series of Data Sets will be required, this is being discussed on a collective basis by the Directors of Community & Enterprise. I have commenced the process of contacting the various relevant agencies with a view to assembling this particular data and I will inform the board of progress in this respect at our meeting.

In addition to Data Sets it would be necessary to identify a number of indicators. Indicators differ from data in that they are one off specific

measures that give a sense of the situation at a particular point in time, they can then be used to develop targets to be reached at a particular future date and as mile stones in reaching these targets. In the strategy document, data will tend to be in appendixes at the end, while indicators will be in the main body of the report.

The attached report (appendix 4) sets out the vast volume of indicators that are possible. The final page appendix (appendix 5) represents a condensed version of these from an economic perspective and I am particularly interested in the board's views on this particular page. It should be noted that similar page will be produced for the social indicators and cultural indicators.